=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-275/paper-20
|storemode=property
|title=Towards a Semantic Wiki for Science
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-275/paper20.pdf
|volume=Vol-275
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/esws/Lange07
}}
==Towards a Semantic Wiki for Science==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-275/paper20.pdf
Towards a Semantic Wiki for Science
Christoph Lange
Computer Science, Jacobs University Bremen, ch.lange@iu-bremen.de
Collaborative work environments (CWEs) for scientific knowledge have many
applications in research and education. In recent years, successful platforms open
for anyone appeared on the web, e. g. Wikipedia and PlanetMath, a wiki particu-
larly tailored to mathematics, or Connexions, a CMS for general courseware1 .
Thanks to flexible content creation and linking, similar systems also support
corporate knowledge management, but they lack services desirable for effective
scientific knowledge management. For example, full text search is not suitable
for mathematical or chemical formulae2 , and tagging pages does not help to find
unproven theorems about triangles. Current semantic wikis [5] solve the latter
problem by typing pages and links with terms from ontologies, but they do not
support formula search, which would require structural semantic markup (SSM),
a common approach in mathematical knowledge management.
Further semantic services that have been realised on the Semantic Web, but
not yet in open CWEs, include dependency maintenance across changes and
learning assistance by suggesting direct and indirect prerequisites to the scholar.
How can the knowledge that is available in CWEs (e. g. the RDF graph behind
a semantic wiki) be used for more than just displaying navigation links, some
editing assistance, and semantic search? I will investigate whether a CWE can
be turned into an integration platform for semantic services by first creating a
uniform ontology abstraction layer at its core 3 and prototype such an application
that supports SSM formats for various scientific domains based on the semantic
IkeWiki [3], as wikis particularly support the stepwise formalisation workflow
required for scientific SSM (cf. [3,1])4 .
SSM, already having many applications in mathematics (e. g. in the context
of the OMDoc XML format [1]), is currently being extended towards other
sciences. Research conducted in our group showed that a three-layered model
of knowledge can be assumed in mathematics and physics, and probably in
most other sciences: Objects (symbols, numbers, equations, molecules, etc.),
statements (axioms, hypotheses, measurement results, examples, with relations
like “proves”, “defines”, or “explains”) and theories (collections of interrelated
statements, defining the context for symbols) [1]. For Semantic Web software,
these classes and relations need to be formalised in an ontology; I will base my
system on the ontologies behind scientific markup languages, and, following the
1
See √
http://www.{wikipedia,planetmath,cnx}.org.
2
c = a2 + b2 can mean the same as x2 + y 2 = z 2 .
3
Ontology support is mostly optional in current systems.
4
The related se(ma)2 wi [6] system is an experiment with a Semantic MediaWiki fed
with mathematical knowledge formatted in OMDoc. The semantic structure of the
formulae and the links between pages is lost during this conversion, though.
assumption that sciences have common traits like the notion of a “theory” or a
“dependency” relation among theories, a generic upper ontology of these. To date,
merely part of the ontologies behind SSM formats are given as human-readable
specifications; I will formalise and generify them in OWL. In a scientific CWE,
one page would usually contain one statement, one small theory, or a course
module aggregating a few of them. A generic mapping mechanism between XML
schemata and ontologies will be applied to extract knowledge that is relevant for
semantic services from those XML pages to an RDF representation.
As SSM is inherently hard to edit manually, the interaction with the semantic
services will be designed in a user-centered way, where the benefits of services like
enhanced search and navigation are shared with the users in order to motivate
them to contribute. One such service is an ontology-based auto-completion of link
targets in the editor. Not all page names starting with the letters typed so far
are suggested, but only those pages whose type matches the range of the relation
the current link represents. Further planned services include a learning assistant
that suggests to explore transitive dependencies, a dependency maintenance
assistant, as well as connecting the system to external services already available,
e. g. MathWebSearch5 . A preliminary classification suggests that most of the cross-
domain services can indeed be modeled on top of the abstraction layer provided
by the above-mentioned upper ontology; a formal analysis of the demands of
the services on knowledge representation will follow. A challenge is, however,
making the different levels of reasoning required by the services (plain triple
query for auto-completion vs. computing compositions of relations for dependency
management) work smoothly in an inherently inconsistent collaborative setting.
An existing prototype of a wiki for OMDoc [2], featuring basic functionality
like page editing, rendering as XHTML+MathML and typed navigation links
from a user’s perspective, and a basic OMDoc/XML to RDF mapping from a
knowledge representation perspective, will be completely redesigned by introduc-
ing a generic ontology-based abstraction layer and integrating semantic services
on top. It will be evaluated in a cross-domain case study with scientists and in an
educational case study with students, leading to feedback for the ontology design.
If the abstraction layer approach does facilitate the design and integration of
semantic services that increase benefit and reduce users’ investment, improving
other CWEs, even in non-scientific domains, in a similar way will become possible.
1. M. Kohlhase. OMDoc – An open markup format for mathematical documents
[Version 1.2]. Number 4180 in LNAI. Springer, 2006.
2. C. Lange. SWiM – a semantic wiki for mathematical knowledge management.
Technical report, Jacobs University Bremen, 2007.
3. S. Schaffert. Semantic social software – semantically enabled social software or
socially enabled semantic web? In Sure and Schaffert [4].
4. Y. Sure and S. Schaffert, editors. Semantics: From Visions to Applications, 2006.
5. M. Völkel, S. Schaffert, and S. Decker, editors. 1st Workshop on Semantic Wikis,
volume 206 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Budva, Montenegro, June 2006.
6. C. Zinn. Bootstrapping a semantic wiki application for learning mathematics. In
Sure and Schaffert [4].
5
http://search.mathweb.org